Alcoholics Anonymous Reviews

The new year taunts you with its promise: No more drinking. No more feeling sick in body and spirit. No more hurting the ones you love.

It's a promise that has dangled beyond your reach new year after new year.

But with 1,600 free meetings in the Valley every week, the earliest starting at 5:30 a.m. and the latest ending at 1 a.m., Alcoholics Anonymous can offer a hand in almost every neighborhood, at almost every hour of the day.

No one says it's going to be easy. But pulling up a chair at a meeting could be the start of grasping 2006's promise. Here's what you might see and hear at a single day's worth of meetings.

Flannel shirttails flapping in the 45-degree gloom, a man pedals his bicycle for all he's worth, rounds a quiet neighborhood road and coasts into the parking lot behind a building tucked beside the Piestewa Freeway.

It's 6:15 a.m., enough time for a cup of the good strong coffee from the dining room and an exchange of greetings with other early arrivals, a couple of them finishing cigarettes in the courtyard. A 5:30 meeting is wrapping up.

This is Crossroads for Men, a halfway house that hosts six AA meetings today. They're open to non-residents, too, and this morning the meeting room fills with about 25 women and men stopping in before work.

They're starting their day the best way they know how, with good intentions and coffee and in the company of like-minded people. The room smells of shampoo and aftershave, of scrambled eggs and toast from the adjacent dining hall.

Bill, a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress syndrome and five treatment programs behind him, leads the meeting today, starting with a moment of silence and the Serenity Prayer.

"Is there anyone here with 30 days and 1,000 nights?" he asks.

There's no need to explain. Many have years of sobriety and hang onto it through nights that seem like years by continuing to attend meetings. As a bonus, their attendance helps newcomers.

Andrea is one of them. Three days sober, she is given a "chip," a metal token about the size of a silver dollar acknowledging her 72-hour-long accomplishment, and a round of hugs.

Bill is the first to share, but his story is not unique, he says.

At his first AA meeting, about 20 years ago, he had a family, a home one block from the ocean, a thriving business and a brand-new Porsche.

"And I was dying," he says. "I wanted to learn how to drink alcohol and use cocaine on a management basis."

One day, he heard his son, then 9 or 10, say, "Mom, you can make me stop doing things I shouldn't. Why can't you make Daddy stop?"

Bill reached the ninth of AA's 12 steps - the one that calls for making direct amends to people you've harmed - and gave up. He reached that step again and again, quit again and again, until finally he lost everything, including his family.

"My head is out to kill me," he says. "It tells me I need to drink."

And so he's back, trying once more to still that voice.

His story reminds another Bill, a younger man, of something longtime AA member Black Wally said to him in 1989, when he was just two weeks sober and still struggling.

"Black Wally was right," the second Bill says. "I did have a mind that was programmed for self-destruction. Our disease tells us that the solution is to pour more alcohol and take more drugs, but in here I've learned that whatever happens, I can deal with it."

Oops! There's a "C" beside the Sharing Time meeting on the AA Web site.

"This meeting is closed," a woman says.

That means no reporters, no students doing reports for school, no relatives who want to learn about the disease. The meeting is limited to people who have a problem with alcohol, and they're here to study Alcoholics Anonymous, a text known as the Big Book.

The eight or so friendly people circling the Unity Church conference table smile apologetically.

"Do you need a phone number so you can find an open meeting?" a man offers.

Most AA meetings are open to anyone interested in the program, but only alcoholics participate in discussions and everyone must adhere to the rule of anonymity - first names only.

This is listed as a gay and lesbian meeting, but David, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, announces that he's neither.

He's joking to make a point: "These doors are open to everyone," he says.

It is a diverse group, in sexual orientation and ethnicity. Age, too, although most are young adults. Many are here on their lunch hour, slipping in the back door of the Lambda Phoenix Center from the parking lot with cellphones and brown-bag lunches in hand.

Ceiling fans stir the air as they chat informally before sharing their stories. Each is handed a numbered ticket and shares when his or her number is called.

Two introduce themselves, state their addiction and are welcomed, but they pass on the chance to speak. That's allowed. The only requirement for AA membership, Tradition Three says, "is a desire to stop drinking."

Gary recalls a dark period when his addiction almost ended his life.

In the hospital and a nursing home afterward, he says, "Scott and some of the other guys brought AA meetings to me every day, sometimes twice a day. I remember crying uncontrollably. I wasn't prepared to die. I was scared because I hadn't done right."

Chris, working to end the destructive behavior that runs in her family, has seen miracles, too, both big and small.

"Every morning I think, 'Well, I woke up, I'm breathing, I know where I am,' " she says.

"And," she adds, "I only have one W-2 form this year."

Ray is celebrating 19 years of sobriety this month, and he laughs now about his early days in AA, when he "challenged all the dorky AA sayings on the wall."

Other members laugh, too. They don't have to look at the signs to remember the messages: One day at a time. Keep coming back. It works if you work it.

"I didn't even like the way you people were dressed," Ray says, then smiles.

It's just a little more than a week until the Disturbed concert, and Elizabeth is worried.

"I only have six days sober," she says, "but I've already got my ticket for the concert. That's going to be a hard one."

Elizabeth says she has never been fired because of alcohol and drug use, has never even called in sick.

"I just was drunk and drove and got caught," she says.

Seated at a long table and on built-in benches along the walls of the U-Can-2 Alano Club, other members stir at her comments. She's right to be worried. One says he was sent back to prison as the result of a post-concert fall off the wagon.

There's no such thing as a little drinking or a little drugging for us, another adds.

This is a world-wise bunch, attendance court-ordered for a handful. There's lots of cigarette smoke, a bag of sunflower seeds at hand, some serious tattoos. And an abundance of life lessons, the reason you're here, after all.

Ray, carrying drywall supplies after a day on the job, describes himself as "a crack-smoking, drinking, lying, cheating son of a bitch."

Now, after almost killing himself in a car accident, he says, "There's nothing better than being clean and sober."

Tony agrees. He drank at blackout levels for 10 to 15 years, he says. Then Black Wally stepped in for him, too, pulling him off the streets and teaching him that "there is a way to recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind."

The meeting ends with the Lord's Prayer, and Donna says, "Don't quit before the miracle." She has found hers: 11 years without a drink.

With the sounds of kids playing on a lawn nearby and footsteps tapping overhead, the ground-floor meeting room at Bethel United Methodist Church feels like home.

This despite the group's longtime meeting place being destroyed by fire in November. Some of the semi-regulars haven't caught up to the news yet, and the group is smaller than usual, 13 tonight.

It's a tightknit group, meeting every weekday after work for a happy hour that lives up to its name. Newcomers are greeted like old friends, offered coffee and AA literature and shown the key to the bathroom down the corridor.

There are the usual readings and recitations: the Serenity Prayer, the Lord's Prayer, AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Members hear them at every meeting and know the words by heart, but they listen as if hearing them for the first time.

You don't get sober by taking the program for granted.

Mondays through Thursdays are discussion meetings. Friday is speaker night. But first, congratulations are in order. Bart and Mike, arriving in office attire after a day at work, celebrated two years of sobriety in December.

Gary, tonight's speaker, attended his first AA meeting 21 years ago, under orders from his doctor. A veteran of Vietnam by then, he had been drinking since age 14.

"Thank God for pain," he says, and he doesn't mean just the physical kind. "Pain makes me do the things I need to do. I didn't look good, I didn't feel good, I didn't sound good."

He didn't admit he was an alcoholic for a long time. But he could say the right things at meetings, he kept going and he stayed sober. Eventually, he "got it."

Gary looks around the room.

"If you want to change your life, you're in the right place," he says.

They've got spiky black hair, gray hair, long hair. They're chewing bubble gum and lining up for coffee and talking with friends, and they fill the auditorium at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, more than 200 of them in all.

Tim, a recovering alcoholic, tells AA jokes while other members pass baskets for donations to defray meeting costs: How many alcoholics does it take to change a light bulb? One to hold the light bulb while the world revolves around him.

Starting with day- and monthlong increments, then half- and full decades, Tim asks people to stand for the length of time they've been sober. Several stand in almost every category. One woman represents the over-50-years-of-sobriety group.

"Way to go, Anita!" a man cheers from across the room.

Roy, from the No Sniveling group in Scottsdale, is the speaker. He hasn't had a drink in 25 1/2 years.

"I was losing my job, my wife was divorcing me, the kids were leaving, the dog was even threatening to leave," he says.

For almost a year, his sponsor took him to a meeting every day. Roy held on, even when his sponsor relapsed. Today, he sponsors six recovering alcoholics and attends five or six meetings a week.

"The harder I work the program, the better I feel," Roy says.

After questions from the audience - how do you handle fears, what have you learned about alcoholism from your son (also an alcoholic)? - it's time to hand out chips.

Greg, a teenager, is celebrating two months of sobriety. A friend seated behind him leans forward and squeezes his shoulder. Amy has seven years, and her friend, an almost imperceptible tattoo marking the spot where her hair grazes the back of her neck, has nine months.

On their way out the doors, members make plans for dinner and dancing and for next week's meeting.

A college boy who arrived by skateboard pulls his transportation from beneath a plastic chair and pushes off, khaki shorts, sweat jacket and goodwill enough to keep him warm for his ride home.

The Arizona Republic